An Ideal Free Settlement Perspective on Residential Positioning in the San Francisco Bay Area

Summary

We present an Ideal Free Distribution Model to explore the successful establishment and spread of hunter-gatherer residential settlements around the perimeter of San Francisco Bay, California. Our objective is to illuminate underlying ecological and social factors that best explain the spatial distribution of occupation in the region. Our model determines relative habitat suitability based on a series of environmental factors including drainage catchment size, rainfall, terrestrial productivity, and littoral productivity. In doing so, we also account for diachronic shifts in shoreline location and its impact on resource distribution. Then we test this model using a robust database of more than 500 prehistoric residential sites around the Bay (of which more than a third have produced chronological data), and ethnohistoric insights into settlement location by linguistic group. The talk concludes with consideration of the effect of social as well as ecological factors in structuring temporal trends in settlement configuration and subsistence strategies that formed the basis of this rich archaeological record.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancestral Native American Archaeology of the San Francisco Bay Area   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage